Prayer

The swans, in discouragement, have migrated from the poisonous lakes this evening,
And sad sisters dream of brothers under the prison walls.
Battles have ended on the blossoming fields of lilies,
And fair women follow coffins from underground passages,
And sing, with heads bowed down towards the ground.

Oh, make haste! Our aching bodies are frozen in these pitiless glooms.
Make haste towards the chapel, where life will be more merciful,
The chapel of the graveyard where our brother sleeps!

An orphan swan is suffering within my soul,
And there, over newly-buried bodies,
It rains blood - it pours from mine eyes.

A crowd of cripples pass along the paths of my heart,
And with them pass barefooted blind men,
In the divine hope of meeting some one in prayer.

And the red dogs of the desert howled all one night,
After hopelessly moaning over the sands
For some unknown, incomprehensible grief.

And the storm of my thoughts ceased with the rain;
The waves were cruelly imprisoned under the frozen waters;
The leaves of huge oaks, like wounded birds,
Dropped with cries of anguish.

And the dark night was deserted, like the vast infinite;
And, with the lonely and bloody moon,
Like a myriad motionless marble statues,
All the dead bodies of our earth arose to pray for one another.